The Black Cat Quells Yin Spirits

The young Chen Ye returns to Guzang to handle the affairs of his ancestral home, left behind by his forebears.

Strange noises keep coming from the old house at night. By chance, he opens a black box left by his great-grandfather and finds a black ledger inside. Its pages are densely filled with names and dates of death. On the very last page, he finds his own name, with his death due in three days.

Dark currents stir in the ancient well in the backyard. Beneath the stone slabs comes the damp sound of something crawling. The talking black cat, Lord Mo, appears to protect its master and warns him not to meddle in the secrets of the debt to the dead.

This ledger is a register of debts to the dead, vomited up by the ancient well.

For generations, the Chen family has carried the bloodline of tomb guardians, watching over an ancient well that suppresses the resentment of countless spirits. Their descendants must obey a cruel rule: the living repay the debts of the dead.

As the seal grows weaker, old debts begin to come due, and the truth about an expedition that vanished thirty years ago comes to light. With death drawing closer by the second, Chen Ye is forced to awaken his tomb-guardian bloodline. Accompanied by the spirit cat Lord Mo, he faces the boundless resentment at the bottom of the well.

When the ancient well finally splits open, he can only plunge into the abyss himself if he wants to survive. The well's crisis subsides for now, and a fragmentary map emerges, pointing to the ancient Qiang ruins in the distant Qilian Mountains. A much larger mystery is only just beginning to unfold.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.